The following relates to mapping data between various data formats, and more specifically to user interfaces and accompanying features used for transferring information between systems.
One of the most popular formats to transfer information between systems is Extensible Markup Language (XML). XML is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The specific structure of a software language such as XML is governed by rules that define elements and types of data. Unfortunately, while defined software structure make sense in a specific context for some compliant systems capable of processing such languages, often the defined software structures do not make sense in the context of other systems that are not compliant that the compliant systems communicate with.
On some occasions it's desirable to convert data of one type to another (for example the user may have defined some custom type and have to communicate with another system that understands a slightly different type that the one present). A common approach to this issue is to, for example, have an XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) file that based on a source XML could generate another which complies with the target schema definition. Unfortunately, writing such XSLT is an extremely technical task that requires familiarity with the XSL standard, knowledge of the underlying representation of the different schema types involved and is commonly error prone.
Therefore, a new and improved method and system of mapping data from one type of data to another is desired.